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“My Character Wouldn’t Do That.”
Everyone thinks this is a bad thing. You’re not being cooperative. You’re not a team player. So what?
There is a constant chorus of people saying the party should get along and function like a well-oiled machine — that party conflict is not the foundation of a story, but an impediment to it. That’s ONE way of playing, and it’s a common one.
But think of it this way: the story told at the table is not just about how the party handles what the GM throws at them. Instead, it’s about whether or not the party CAN handle it; whether or not the party WANTS to handle it.
Simply because the party doesn’t want to delve into a dangerous dungeon to stop an unspeakable evil doesn’t mean the … Read entire article »

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Since August, the internet has been in an uproar about the #gamergate controversy. It seems that everyone has a different opinion about the point of the movement and its impact on the … Read more »

When last we spoke ...
We were talking about armor as damage reduction in the Pathfinder game. The next part of the variant rules available from the Ultimate Combat Guide involve replacing hit … Read more »

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I just finished the first session of my Edge of the Empire campaign. It was a lot of fun (the actual play will be up on the happyjacks.org site in a couple weeks). Even though this was only the first session, I did learn a couple of valuable lessons.
One: Character shared history.
EotE doesn’t have any mechanical way to weave characters’ backstories together. With my group, this wasn’t a big deal, as they’ll all simply decide they’re a team and they work as such. But often, some players need a motivation to trust or work with other PCs. Having some sort of shared back story can help this along. Were I to do character gen again, … Read entire article »

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This article is from around 1995 as far as I can tell. I designed a free-form magic system for GURPS (probably 3rd edition, I’m guessing). My gaming hiatus started around the time this article was written, so I never got around to playtesting it.
The Principles of Magic and the Order of Things
Alternate and Additional Rules for Magic in GURPS
By Stu Venable, Jr.
The Science of Magic
Most mages learn spells by rote. Many mages, even some of the most powerful ones, may know scores of spells but be unable to describe the forces that make the magics work. They have been taught the procedures and rituals that make magic, but they do not understand the underlying principles … Read entire article »

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I originally wrote in article for the old Happy Jacks RPG Resources. You can find it mixed in with homebrewing stuff on Archive.org if you want to find it. This article is almost 20 years old, but much of what I wrote here still rings true — to me at least.
In the fall of 1978, as a seventh grader in junior high school, I was introduced to the world of Fantasy Role Playing when a friend bought the DnD Beginners Set. It came with a basic rule book and some cardboard chits in place of dice. We played through the sample adventure, and I was hooked. Within a week or two I was creating my … Read entire article »

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So! Wizards of the Coast has released Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition under the Open Gaming License. They’ve also created the Dungeon Masters Guild so that creators can use WotC’s non-OGLed intellectual property and sell them through OneBookShelf (the parent company of RPGNow and DriveThruRPG). That’s big news. But what does it mean?
First off, let me state that I am not a lawyer. However, I was once an RPG publisher, and as such I paid a lawyer obscene amounts of money to insure I understood the OGL.
The OGL allows a publisher to take content released as Open Game Content under the OGL and freely use it in their own works. It provides protection for content that a … Read entire article »